Certain types of audio telephony are susceptible to degradations in voice quality. For example, cellular telecommunication is notorious for marginal-to-poor call quality at certain times of the day and year, and in certain geographic areas where coverage is a problem. As another example, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telecommunication has also been known to exhibit unacceptable call quality, depending on various characteristics such as how each phone gains access to the network, the audio encoding algorithms being employed, the traffic that is already present along the access paths, packet loss and delay, routing inefficiencies, and the traffic-handling capability of the network.
A common problem is that the communication path between two call participants can be afflicted with poor call quality in one direction while the other direction still has acceptable quality. This occurs frequently in asymmetric networks that provide different upload and download speeds. A more annoying problem is that asymmetric voice quality impairments can be transient, especially with VoIP systems. A reason that voice quality asymmetry can occur with VoIP systems is that, unlike traditional telephone systems, VoIP networks tend to carry both voice and data. Illustratively, if a large amount of non-voice data are moved suddenly from Point-A to Point-B, while much smaller amounts are being moved from B to A, it would not be unusual during the data transfer for the voice quality from A to B to be worse than the quality from B to A.
The annoying aspect of transient asymmetric voice quality impairments is that the speaker is often unaware of the impairment until informed of the problem by the other party. This is a situation that virtually every user of certain types of telecommunications networks (e.g., VoIP, cellular, etc.) has experienced at least once, often resulting in frustration and lost time because of the need to repeat what was said. Therefore, a need exists for an audio mechanism that will inform users, in real-time, that their voice is not being transmitted clearly to the other party or parties on the call.